Competitive and cooperative particle swarm optimization with information sharing mechanism for global optimization problems

This paper proposes an information sharing mechanism (ISM) to improve the performance of particle swarm optimization (PSO). The ISM allows each particle to share its best search information, so that all the other particles can take advantage of the shared information by communicating with it. In this way, the particles could enhance the mutual interaction with the others sufficiently and heighten their search ability greatly by using the search information of the whole swarm. Also, a competitive and cooperative (CC) operator is designed for a particle to utilize the shared information in a proper and efficient way. As the ISM share the search information among all the particles, it is an appropriate way to mix up information of the whole swarm for a better exploration of the landscape. Therefore, the competitive and cooperative PSO with ISM (CCPSO-ISM) is capable to prevent the premature convergence when solving global optimization problems. The satisfactory performance of CCPSO-ISM is evaluated by comparing it with other variants of PSOs on a set of 16 global optimization functions. Moreover, the effectiveness and efficiency of CCPSO-ISM is validated under different test environments such as biased initialization, coordinate rotated and high dimensionality. (C) 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.